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This work by Dr. Putnam is the first in a series of medical handbooks known as the Mind and Health Series, edited by Mr. H. Addington Bruce, and designed “to present the results of recent research and clinical experience in a form intelligent to the lay public and medical profession.”
Dr. Putnam's work is an effort to set forth the meaning of the recent psychoanalytic movement in psychology and clinical psychiatry. This movement is broadly envisaged and is set forth as no less than an effort to sound the ultimate depths of character—to discover the origins of human motives—to the end that the patient may know himself, and in that fuller knowledge go back to his life's work with a firmer grasp on what living really means and a more certain control of the forces within himself.
The author discusses the problem of character building in the broadest possible way. He lays its foundations in genetic psychology and traces its furthest reaches in the domains of religion and philosophy. It is a work which ably fulfills its purpose and which ought to go far in disarming—one cannot refrain from saying—the silly criticisms which have been launched against psychoanalysis by those who should have known better.
The book is written from a wealth of human experience by this veteran neurologist and we see in it the evidences of its New England origin in the love with which he frequently marshals some chosen bit of Emerson's to illustrate his point. The reviewer heartily commends the work to all those interested.
White